Lochinvar: A Novel

So, vanishing for a tale of minutes, which seemed hours to the pale, wounded, half-frenzied figure at the window, he returned with a "geleck" or iron crow-bar, with which he promptly started work on the lime and plaster of the stanchions. It was not long before he loosened one and then another. Once or twice he had to cower down in order to escape the lanterns of the patrol – for, unlike the clans, the Cameronians kept excellent watch; but in half an hour his task was completed.

"The Lord forgie me, laddie, for this!" he said, as he helped Wat out, and felt the palms of his hands burning hot, while his body was shaking with feverish cold.

"Now help me to get a horse!" said Wat, as soon as they stood in safety under the ruined walls of the cathedral. "There are the stables of the officers' horses. Come, let us go over yonder."

"It's a rope's end at ony rate," said Scarlett; "old Jack has been at mony ploys, but he never was a horse-thief before!"

"How did we get away from the city of Amersfort, tell me, Jack?" said Wat, with a touch of his ancient humor, being pleased at getting his will.

"Ah, but then a woman did the stealing for love, as you do now. It is different with me, that have no love to steal for – or to die for, either," he added, sadly.

Wat put his hand affectionately on the shoulder of the old free-lance.

"Even so do you steal, old bear," he said, gently patting him; "you do it for love of me."

"I declare," quoth Scarlett, with relief in his voice, "I believe I do. Guid kens what there is aboot ye, laddie, that makes both lassies and auld grizzle-pates run their heads into holes and their necks into tow-ropes for the love o' ye!"

The stables had been left completely unguarded, for it was the officers' boast that they desired not any greater safety than their men. Cleland, indeed, had once ordered all the officers' horses to be brought out and shot, just because some of the soldiers complained that the officers had a greater chance of escape than they.

Since that time the horses had been permitted to remain in the not too zealous care of the grooms, who fulfilled their duty by sleeping in the town at a distance from their charges.

Even the very stable door was unlocked, and as they opened it the horses were heard restlessly moving within.

"Any of Keppoch's gay lads might make a haul very easily this nicht," said Scarlett, as they entered.

"I saw Keppoch and many another pretty fighter get his bellyful over there by the walls the other day," said Wat, grimly, as he proceeded coolly to make his selection by the sense of touch alone.

When he had done this, Scarlett and he saddled the chosen beast and led him out, having previously tied stable rags over his iron-shod feet to keep them from clanking on the pavement. Making a detour, they soon gained the river, which they skirted cautiously till they were a mile from the town. Then Wat mounted without the assistance of his companion.

"God help ye, laddie; ye will never win near your lass, I fear me. But ye can try. And that is aye the best o't in this world. That it is for us mortals to do the trying, and for God to finish ilka job to His ain liking."

With which sage reflection he gave Wat his sword, his pistols and ammunition, together with some bread for the journey – looking at which last, Wat felt that he could as soon eat his horse's tail.

"Hae!" said the master-at-arms, "ye will be the better o' that or ye come to the end o' the Lang Wood. I have plenty more by me."

Wat laughed.

"You cannot deceive a desperate man," he said, "nor yet lie to him. Well do I know that this is every bite you have in the world."

"Listen, Wat," said the free-lance. "I have found me a decent woman that has ta'en a liking to me, and she has ta'en me in. I'm weel provided for. Tak' them, laddie, tak' them. Ye will need them mair nor me."

Saying which Scarlett started promptly on the back track to the town, crying as he went: "God speed ye, laddie; I'll never set een on ye mair!"

So with a sob in his throat and a feeling as if he were riding on empty air, Wat Gordon turned the head of the officer's charger (by a strange and fitting chance it was his cousin Will's), and set his chest to the current of the river, at the place where the tracks on the shoaling gravel and the chuckling of the shallow river over its pebbles indicated a ford.

So our true hero, ill, fevered, desperate, in the stark grip with death, started on his almost impossible quest – without an idea or a plan save that he must ride into the blank midnight to save his love, or die for her.

CHAPTER XLVIII

THE MASTER COMES HOME

And what in all the annals of romantic adventure could be found more utterly hopeless than Wat Gordon's quest? He was doubly outlawed. For not only had James Stuart proclaimed him outlaw, but he had been out with the enemies of the Prince of Orange, now King William the Third of Great Britain and Ireland. He had fought at Killiekrankie and Dunkeld. He had ridden through all the north country at Dundee's bridle-rein. He was a fugitive from a military prison in the prince's own province of the Netherlands. He possessed but ten golden guineas in the world. His ancestral tower of Lochinvar was little better than a dismantled fortalice. And then as to his quest, he went to seek his love in her home, to rescue her from among her friends, and from the midst of the retainers of her father's estate, and those more numerous and reckless riders who had come with my lady the duchess from the Grenoch. Doubtless, also, my Lord of Barra would bring with him a great attendance of his friends. The chances against Lochinvar's success were infinite. Another man would have given up in despair, but in the mind of Wat Gordon there was only one thought: "She called me and I will go to her. Though I am traitor and outlaw alike to the king-over-the-water and the prince at Whitehall, proscribed alike by white rose and orange lily, I am yet all true to Kate and to love."

The desperate, unutterable details of that great mad journey can never be written down. For even Wat himself, in after-days, scarce remembered how, when one horse was wearied, he managed to exchange it for another and ride on – sometimes salving his conscience by leaving to the owner one of his dwindling golden guineas; or how he was attacked by footpads and escaped, having cut down one and frightened the other into delivering over (in trust, as it were, for King James) every stiver of his ill-gotten gains – poor crazed Wat meanwhile tossing his fevered head and wavering a pistol before the knave's astonished eyes as he bade him stand and deliver.

"'Tis a lesson to you," said Wat, didactically; "ye will thank me for it one day when ye lie down to die a clean-straw death instead of dancing your last on a gallows, with the lads crying your dying speech beneath your very feet as ye dangle over the Grass-market."

How he won through with bare life Wat never knew; nor yet with what decent householders he had negotiated exchange of horses without their consent. For long years afterwards, whenever Wat was a little feverish, scraps of conversations used to return to him, and forgotten incidents flashed clear upon him, which he knew must have happened during these terrible last days ere, with the homing instinct of a wounded animal chased desperately by the hunters, he reached the little gray tower of Lochinvar set lonely in the midst of its moorland loch. Sometimes on the Edinburgh street in after-years he stumbled unexpectedly on a face he recognized. A countryman newly come into market would set his hands on his hips and stare earnestly up at him. Then Wat would say to himself, "There goes a creditor of mine; I wonder if I gave him a better horse than I took, or if he wants to claim the balance now."

But who in the great lord of Parliament could spy out the white-faced, desperate lad – half-hero, half-highwayman – whose supple sword flashed like the waving of a willow wand, and whose cocked pistol was in his fingers at the faintest hint of opposition?

It was evening of a great, solemn, serene September day when Wat reached the edges of the loch, upon the little island in the midst of which stood the ancestral tower of his forebears. There was no smoke going up from its chimneys. The water slept black from the very margin, deeply stained with peat. The midges danced and balanced; the moor-birds cried; the old owl hooted from the gables; the retired stars twinkled reticently above, just as they had done in Wat's youth. A strange fancy came over him. He had come home from market at Dumfries. Presently his father would cry down to him from his chamber what was the price of sheep on the Plainstones that day, and if that behindhand rascal, Andrew Sim of Gordieston, had paid his rent yet. His mother —

Ah! but wait; he had no father! He had seen his father's head over the port of Edinburgh, and something, he could not remember what, happened after that. Had he not buried his mother in the green kirkyard of Dalry? What, then, had he come home for? There was some one he loved in danger – some one with eyes deep as the depths of the still and gloomy waters that encircled Lochinvar.

Ah, now he remembered – the heart, Kate's heart of gold! It was safe in his bosom. Ten days' grace when he left his cousin Will! But had he ridden five days or fifty? Sometimes it seemed but one day, and sometimes an eternity, since he rode away from Jack Scarlett at the ford above Dunkeld.

What was that noise? An enemy? Wat clutched his sword instinctively. No, nothing more than his poor horse, the last incarnation of his cousin Will's charger, with which he had left the stables of Dunkeld.

The poor beast had tried to drink of the peaty brew of the loch, but what with the fatigue and the rough riding, it had fallen forward, with its nose in the shallows, and now lay breathing out its last in rattling gasps.

Wat stooped and patted the flaccid neck as the spasms relaxed and it rolled to the side.

"Poor thing – poor thing – ye are well away. Maybe there is a heaven for horses also, where the spirit of the beast may find the green eternal pastures, where the rein does not curb and the saddle leather never galls."

So saying Wat divested himself of his arms and upper clothing. He rolled them up, and put them with the saddle and equipment of his dead horse in the safe shelter of a moss-hag. Then, with a last kiss to the gold heart, he dropped silently into the water and swam out towards the island on which the old block-house stood.

Five minutes later Walter Gordon, Lord of Lochinvar, white as death, dripping from head to foot as if the sea had indeed given up its dead, stood on the threshold of the house of his fathers. The master had come home.

The little gray keep on its lonely islet towering above him seemed not so high as of old. It was strangely shrunken. The isle, too, had grown smaller to his travelled eye – probably was so, indeed, for the water had for many years been encroaching on the narrow insulated policies of the tower of Lochinvar.

There to his right was the granite "snibbing-post," to which the boat was usually tied. The pillar had, he remembered, a hole bored through the head of it with a chip knocked out of the side – for making which with a hammer he had been soundly cuffed by his father. And there was the anchored household boat itself, nodding and rocking a little under the northern castle wall, where it descended abruptly into the deeps of the loch.

Wat stood under the carved archway and clattered on the door with a stone picked from the water-side. For the great brass knocker which he remembered had been torn off, no doubt during the troubles which had arisen after Wat himself had been attainted for the wounding of his Grace the Duke of Wellwood.

It was long indeed ere any one came to answer the summons, and meanwhile Wat stood, dripping and shaking, consumed with a deadly weakness, yet conscious of a still more deadly strength. If God would only help him ever so little, he thought – grant him but one night's quiet rest, he could yet do all that which he had come so fast and so far to accomplish.

At last he heard a stir in the tower above. A footstep came steadily and lightly along the stone passages. The thin gleam of a rushlight penetrated beneath the door, and shed a solid ray through the great worn key-hole. The bolts growled and screeched rustily, as if complaining at being so untimely disturbed. The door opened, and there before Wat stood a sweet, placid-browed old lady in the laced cap and stomacher of the ancient days.

"Jean!" he cried, "Jean Gordon, here is your laddie come hame." He spoke just as he had done more than twenty years ago, when many a time he had fallen out with his mother, and betaken himself to the sanctuary of Jean's Wa's by the side of the Garpel Glen.

For Jean Gordon it was, the recluse of the Holy Linn, his cousin Will's ancient nurse and kinswoman, and to them both the kindliest and most lovely old maid in the world.

"Wi' laddie, laddie, what has gotten ye? Ye are a' white and shakin', dripping wet, too; come ben and get a change and let me put ye to your bed."

"What day of the month is this?" cried Wat, eagerly, even before he had crossed the threshold.

"Laddie, what should auld Jean Gordon ken aboot times and seasons? Nocht ava – ye couldna expect it. But there is a decent man in the kitchen that mayhap can tell ye – Peter McCaskill, the Curate o' Dalry, puir body. He was sorely in fear of being rabbled by the Hill Folk, so he cam' his ways here, silly body. There's no' a man in the country-side wad hae laid hand on him – if he would just say his prayer withoot the book, gie his bit sermon, and stop havering aboot King Jamie – at least, till he comes to his ain again."